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53 posts categorized "Skout.com"

BUSINESSWIRE - Aug 3 - Total Q2 revenue was $31.3M, up 91% YOY, mobile revenue was $23.3M, up 55% YOY. The company has increased daily video minutes by 80% to 7.2M, with ~20% of its users watching videos every day. They expect to fully launch livestreaming video on Tagged and Skout by the end of this quarter. The Meet Group will also launch new banner and native advertising units within the video experience and gifting inside of video.

BUSINESS WIRE - May 8 - Total revenue climbed up 51% YOY to $20M, mobile revenue is $18.8M, up 61% YOY. Net income is $0.4M. "We made strong progress toward rolling out livestreaming video inside of the MeetMe app. Currently, three out of four MeetMe users have access to the Live feature within the MeetMe app", said CEO Geoff Cook.

BUSINESSWIRE - Apr 4 - MeetMe has completed its acquisition of if(we), a social and mobile technology company, and changed its name to The Meet Group. The if(we) acquisition is expected to contribute $9M of adjusted EBITDA in the first 12 months post-close and to provide the combined company with a path forward for generating $150M in annualized revenue and $50M of adjusted EBITDA. Moving forward, The Meet Group will be the parent company of the MeetMe, Skout, Tagged, and Hi5 brands.

BUSINESSWIRE - Feb 22 - Users of MeetMe and Skout will be able to browse the combined user bases, view profiles and photos from both apps, and chat between the two platforms. MeetMe intends to complete the rollout across its mobile apps over the next month.

NASDAQ - Oct 5 - The two companies had entered into a cash-stock acquisition deal in June. The deal was valued at $54.6M, of which MeetMe paid $28.5M in cash, and the rest in stock. In May 2016, Skout had 3.5M MAU. Last year, it had garnered $28.5M in revenues. Skout's Q3 2016 revenues are expected to be ~$6.6M. Meetme expects revenues for 2016 to come between $73.5M and $75.5M.

OPW INTERVIEW - Aug 10 - MeetMe had impressive Q2 results and announced their acquisition of Skout, one of the hallmark mobile brands in the dating industry. I spoke to Geoff Cook, CEO and Co-founder of MeetMe, about the acquisition and what it will mean for both brands. - Mark Brooks

Why did you choose to buy Skout?I have always been impressed by Skout's number of chats per user per day. We've made a lot of progress on MeetMe, going from 8-10 chats per day to 25-30 chats per day, and Skout was having comparable numbers. We felt very familiar and comfortable with their business model. 90% of their revenue comes from ads, which is very similar to our business model. They have 700k-800k DAU, combined we're ~2M DAU. We looked at some of the top level metrics and saw this merge as a pretty clear pathway to $100M revenue. So it made sense both strategically, operationally, and financially.

Would you say that the acquisition of Skout has expanded your geographic footprint?It certainly expanded our geographic footprint. ¾ of Skout's DAUs are international. MeetMe is much more focused on the US. Only half of our 1.3M DAUs are international. Skout is strong in Asia, so this will also increase our density among Asian users.

So, in these areas, will you promote Skout or MeetMe? How do you intersperse the numbers and drive membership between the two?The first thing we will be working on is the lowest hanging fruit. We can improve their ad program based on our knowledge of mobile monetization. We are also thinking about cross promotion to drive MeetMe users to Skout and vice versa. We do intend to maintain Skout as a standalone brand. But over time, there will be no reason to have two separate cloud based chat systems.

How would you imagine someone describing the Skout end user experience vs the MeetMe experience?They are very similar. In terms of how they are different, MeetMe has put a fair amount of emphasis on "Discuss" feature, where we transformed feeds into topic oriented communities. Skout has "Queue", a swipe-able feature where you can like or dislike different users to unlock the chat, which is a relatively important piece of their app. We will continue investing in both "Queue" and "Discuss" and make them better.

How about the teams? Will you have an office in San Francisco? Have any changes been made?At the time of the announcement, there was a reduction at Skout. Skout's founders, Christian Wiklund and Niklas Lindstrom, have both agreed to help us for a year. We will maintain a team and an office in San Francisco and are looking to be posting open positions shortly to tap into the talent pool there. Right now we have our main office in New Hope, PA, and we have a satellite office in Philadelphia in order to tap into that job market.

SEEKING ALPHA - July 6 - MEET is still trading at a 40-70% discount to peers with similar growth rates and EBITDA margins. The company's financial leverage is powerful; ~65% of incremental revenue dollars should convert to EBITDA in 2016, and ~85% of 2016 EBITDA converts to FCF. The acquisition has raised the ceiling on how big MeetMe can be multiple fold, and investors should want to own the company while management adopts best practices across both the MeetMe and Skout app to drive improved revenue and profitability growth. MEET is attractively positioned as a pure-play investment opportunity levered to the shift in advertising dollars towards mobile devices.

ZACKS - June 29 - Shares of MeetMe gained ~12% after the dating app operator announced its acquisition of one of its smaller competitors, Skout on Monday. MeetMe has inked a definitive agreement to acquire Skout in a cash-and-stock deal (~$54.6M in total). The acquisition is anticipated to be completed on Oct 1, 2016. The acquisition will increase MeetMe's user base by 69% to 8.5M.

BUSINESSWIRE - June 26 - MeetMe, a public social discovery service, is acquiring Skout for $28.5M in cash and ~5.37M common shares of MeetMe. Skout is a mobile app for meeting new people with 2015 revenue of $23.8M and 3.5M monthly active users. Skout is adding 42K new users each day on average. Key highlights of the expected scale of the new combined company include: Mobile MAU of 8.5M, an increase of 69% from MeetMe's 5M in May 2016; mobile daily active users of 2.1M, an increase of 73% from MeetMe's 1.24M in May 2016. Geoff Cook, CEO of MeetMe, said, "We believe this combination provides a pathway to $100M in revenue in 2018 with adjusted EBITDA margins approaching 45%."

WASHINGTON POST - Aug 6 - Dating apps usually require that their users be above 18 or 21. But Hot Or Not welcomes anyone over 13, the absolute minimum age set by a 1998 law that governs children’s online privacy. Tinder also openly welcomes underage users. 7% of Tinder users are between 13 and 17. Most of these apps do claim to segregate the over-18s from the under-18s. Tinder only shows adult users to other adults. But it is easy to falsely register as a 14-year-old looking to hook up. COPPA, the federal statute that governs how Internet companies interact with kids, only applies to children younger than 14. And under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a site operator can’t be held responsible for the misdeeds of its users. Skout also allows users under 18 but it moderates them relentlessly.

TECH CRUNCH - June 20 - Skout, an app backed by Andreessen Horowitz that helps strangers meet locally, is branching out with a new group messaging app called Fuse. Once someone starts a ‘Fuse,’ everyone else has 3-10 minutes to respond. Once the timer ends, all of the content disappears. There’s also a Ghost mode, so people can respond anonymously. Skout CEO Christian Wiklund said they broke out the app separately because they didn’t want to bog down the core Skout experience with too many extra features. That’s a similar decision to what Facebook has done with Paper and Messenger.

VENTURE BEAT - May 2 - Skout has acquired Nixter, a small startup with an app that helps people find nightclubs. Together, they are launching NightLifeGraph.com aimed at helping nightclub promoters sell tickets and manage their guest lists. Skout has been profitable for the past six months and is adding 1.5M new users each month. Skout's users are young urban dwellers looking for something to do and someone to do it with. Nixter was founded in 2008 by two pairs of brothers who were working as nightclub promoters. NightLifeGraph.com is free for nightclubs and makes money by charging consumers: For instance, it tacks a $1.54 surcharge onto a $10 ticket. Location-based advertising could be another source of revenue.

TECH CRUNCH - Sep 5 - Mobile dating app Skout raised $22 million from Andreessen Horowitz and is more than half a decade old. It also had a recent spate of spamming its users using other user profiles to drive activity. According to Skout, this was caused by a bug which is now fixed. A company with Skout’s scale certainly tracks its metrics and must have noticed the spike in messages being sent.

LA TIMES - June 21 - Skout shut down its forum for 13- to-17-year-olds last week and assigned a team of security specialists to determine whether it can make the app safe for teens. If not, the company plans to close that forum for good. The alleged assaults on two girls, ages 12 and 15, and on a 13-year-old boy underscore how tough it can be to keep kids safe on a new generation of mobile apps. Skout was originally created as a flirting app for adults, and users had to be 18 or older to sign up. It morphed into more of a social networking app that finds people nearby with whom a user can swap messages, photos and virtual gifts and make plans to meet up. But so many of the app’s users were kids (~15%) that last year Skout opened a separate forum for teens.

WSJ - June 15 - 15M people had downloaded Skout. ~15% of the users were 13 to 17 years old. On Tuesday, that all changed. Skout suddenly shut down its teen community amid reports that predators allegedly connected with minors and raped or sexually assaulted them, using Skout’s app to facilitate the meetings. “We would ban all users from Skout if we had to, if we felt their safety was at risk, and we wouldn’t wait to do it,” CEO Wiklund said. Could Skout have prevented the situation with better technology? According to Wiklund, Skout’s security measures already included algorithms and bots that automatically looked for “bad behavior” by users. Skout also used crowdsourced photo moderation provided by Crowdflower to monitor profiles for pornographic content. The teen community generated about 20% of the company’s revenue, the CEO reports. Revenue was not a consideration in shutting it down, he said. Social networks, from Skout to Facebook, have yet to crack the code of accurate age verification online. Credit cards might be a potential avenue to online identity verification. But Wiklund says, “Teens don’t generally have credit cards.” Instead, Skout is considering other approaches. These may involve verifying a user’s identity against their profiles on Facebook.

LA TIMES - June 12 - Skout has temporarily shut down its services for teens amid a series of rape allegations involving its underage users. "Until we can design better protections, we are temporarily shutting down the under-18 community," founder Christian Wiklund wrote. In the last couple of weeks, three men ranging in age from 21 to 37 have been accused of posing as teenagers on the app's teen forum and allegedly luring boys and girls ages 12 to 15 to sexually assault them, according to a New York Times report. The men, all currently facing criminal charges, allegedly used Skout to contact minors.

BUSINESS INSIDER - May 13 - Christian Wiklund, CEO of Skout, wants to build a global network on the scale of Facebook and Twitter. Skout is adding 40k - 50K new users on the app every day. Dating and flirting only comprises ~20%t of Skout's use cases. Most use it to just meet new friends.

Q: What are you focusing on now?CW: To build a global network for meeting new people.

Q: Things weren't always doing this well though. A: It's really in the past year that we've really taken off. A year ago we were signing up 100K per month. Now it's 40-50k users per day.

Q: What are you using the money you've raised for? A: I don't want to take one market by market, I want to push everything as quick as possible. We need more engineers, iOS developers and back-end developers.

Q: A big focus now seems to be dating. Will that change?A: Our lates survey found 80% were now using it for finding new friends, 20% for dating. It's a place people go to socialize. Will there be flirting? Yes. Will there be friendships made? Yes.

Q: What's are the goals for this year?A: Keep pushing the product forward.

Q: Do you still expect to make money if you shift the focus away from dating?A: Skout is free. We charge for extras such as seeing who checked you out. My bet is that it's still gonna work.

TECH CRUNCH - Apr 3 - Eighteen months ago Christian Wiklund’s company Skout was down to three people after burning much of the $4.6M it had raised since being founded in 2007. Wiklund and his co-founder Niklas Lindstrom put their heads down. They changed the app to focus on young people who wanted to meet strangers and singles who wanted to flirt. Skout’s new app came at a very lucky time in the market. The app supports ~300M messages per month and it’s signing up ~1M users per month. So on the back of this turnaround, Skout is raising $22M in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. With the funding, Skout plans to find a new office that will hold 120 people.

BETAKIT - Mar 13 - According to Juniper Research, the mobile dating market is expected to grow to $1.4 billion by 2013, and startups are poised to take advantage of that growth. A recent study by Skout noted that 69% of people were comfortable meeting up with someone they met on their iPhone, and 40% were using a mobile dating service while out at bars, clubs and restaurants. The U.S.-based app also lets romance-seekers view “hotspots” on Google Maps as a fiery glow, representing what locations are currently trending. Grindr uses geolocation to enable users to find other men within close proximity. This is accomplished through a user interface that displays a grid of user pictures, arranged from nearest to farthest away. Tapping on a picture will display a brief profile for that user, as well as the option to chat, send pictures, and share one’s location. Sharing location-based data brings up the question of safety. Ian Bell is the founder of Tingle, a dating app for iPhone. He said the idea of using location in a dating app can make users wary. Tingle tracks a user’s location and shares their proximity, as opposed to a specific location, when users pass near one another.

by Asif KhanThe full article was originally published at Beta Kit, but is no longer available.